Smells: biryani and burning tires, concrete and saffron, sewage and frangi-pangi, diesel fumes and the smell of the sea, a wet, salty tang, like the smell of a hand that’s been clutching coins. It’s the breeze off the sea, the Andaman Sea, that animates the yellow flags of the mosque next door and sends forked-tail swallows banking and wheeling off its currents. Madras hip-hop blaring from scratchy tape decks, and the first fluttering bats whispering by on silent wings.
In my room: a narrow bed, slat ribs poking up. A fan turns overhead, smoky mirror and batik fabric tacked to grimy walls.

I am alone in the Andamans, Ptolemy’s fabled “land of cannibals,” Sinbad’s “string of island pearls,” waiting for a boat. Me and my surfboards. They lie next to the bed, gleaming through green bubble-pack, mute but still eloquent even here, even this far off course, even this far from where I started.

“Find us some waves,” they say. “Prove that you love us.”

It’s been said that I the end it’s all about salt, but it’s not. It’s about water. The world’s, my own. Here in my little room at the hotel Dhanalakshmi on the Clocktower Square, It’s so hot. But it’s hotter outside and island capital broiling in the noonday sun. Port Blair, with its perfect deep-water harbor crystal ocean cupped in the green-backed hands of rolling headlands. I’m supposed to meet the yacht Crescent here, at a small islet connected to the mainland by a low tarmac bridge called Chatham Jetty.

Other members of the tribe are sailing here from the other side of the Andaman Sea. Chris Malloy and a crew of usual suspects— Jack Johnson, Tamayo Perry and Aaron Lambert from the North Shore, Josh Bradbury and Hans Hagen from California, and token Aussie grom James Catto from Margaret River— are on board, led by the intrepid photographer John Callahan, who had the dream and the British Admiralty charts. They are a day and a half overdue and I have no way to contact them. Theirs is the longer road, by far: by plane from Singapore to Bangkok to Phuket, Thailand, then an eight-hour bus ride through the coastal mountains, across the border in to Burma, and then to Myanyar, From there, it’s two days across to the Andaman Sea in the chartered Crescent.

“I’ll meet you in Port Blair,” I said in back in California, savoring the sound of the words even as I’d spoke them. So romantic. Now, here by myself in a forgotten archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, technically only a few days from home, I’d love to see some fellow surfers. Nobody here knows what I am. At the airport’s little white customs shack, I tried to explain my boards. “To ride the waves,” I said. “Thira mala”— big waves in Tamil A sweaty soldier in green khakis just shook his head. My taxi driver, face dark as licorice, wearing dusty black slacks and a long-sleeve cotton shirt with the cuffs unbuttoned, shook his small head, too.

“No wave in this sea,” he told me. “Must go to Ceylon.”

Nobody I know, and nobody I know knows anybody who has ever surfed in the Andamans. For good reason, maybe

So I have traveled all this way to the Aberdeen Bazaar to wait in this small room, sweat raising small boils on my legs beneath a blue sarong. My room cost 38 rupees— about US $3.50— because it has a fan, and here in Port Blair the fan is life, the way fire would be to somebody who is freezing. Yesterday, midday, I stretched out on the thin little mattress and fell asleep, flat on my back. Los Angeles-Taipei-Kuala Lumpur-Madras-Port Blair… I was beyond jet lag. More like in shock. So I pulled shut the awful brow curtains and to the hum of the fan and the roar of the generator outside in the courtyard, fell into a fitful sleep. Sometime during the next hour the generator coughed and quit, and in an instant my little box became a kiln. I started to sweat. And sweat. The moisture was being wrung out of me like a sponge. It dripped off my chest, outlining my torso in a pattern of small wet spots on the stained sheet. It ran down my arms, one of them hanging out off the bed, so that a small pool formed on the scuffed tile below. And, lying on my back the way I was, it filled my clenched eyes like twin wells.

1998. A decade and a half ago. I swam like a fish – always have – but I didn’t know the first thing about surfing (except that they were bleached and tanned to an inch of their lives and were Peter Pan incarnate). But I guess what’s truly embarrassing is that I hadn’t the faintest inkling that surfer dudes could express themselves as well as this unnamed (unbylined?) friend of Jack and Tamayo and Aaron and Josh and Hans and Cobber James and…yeah, the guy with the Captain Barbosa Admiralty charts.

I still don’t surf, but I dive, off the Andamans, and it’s heaven. I would dearly like to know whether or not our friends here found the waves they wanted. The last wave that was big as a house and then some was the supertsunami that hit the Andaman and Nicobar Islands six years after this odyssey. Personally, I haven’t seen a wave that a surfboard could comb, but I wouldn’t trust my ocular acuity or judgment: There are waves here that could run down a locomotive, skulking around the next promontory.

Reading this piece is like popping up a memory seam: Everything seems just that bit off-kilter. Port Blair biryani isn’t. Tape decks are history. Batik prints are, um, infradig. Madras hip-hop had a short life. Swallows: the last I’d heard, they weren’t coming deeper south than the Northeast and Sikkim. And the dollar’s stampeded from Rs. 11 to nearly Rs. 55.